Anthropologist explains NPOs' role in Bangladesh
Joe Trombello
News Writer
Rockefeller visiting fellow and anthropologist Lamia Karim presented research gathered during her fieldwork in Bangladesh Thursday at a lecture for International Studies.
Her talk "The `Surrogate' Capitalist: Women-Targeted Programs and the Emergence of New Technologies of Control in Bangladesh," is part of the Kroc Center's lecture series on religion, conflict, and peace building. She focused on the role that non-governmental organizations (NGOs) have played in the social and economic lives of poor Bangladeshi women.
"[NGOs] has resulted in the reproduction of usury in rural society," Karim said, "and women have emerged as a new class of small moneylenders. The poorer the borrower, the lower is her ability to invest money productively."
The NGOs present in Bangladesh are large and corporate, having millions of clients and tens of thousands of employees. These organizations claim to promote the empowerment of women as investors and economic providers, but Karim showed how the system's structure instead fosters to further control and subjugate women. Most women are ordered by their husbands to participate in the NGOs microlending program; they have no control over the matter, Karim said.
"It [NGOs] has really become a business – in the 1990s, more and more NGOs have moved away from providing social services to providing microcredit lending," she said.
The system of microlending works as the World Bank lends money to these non-governmental organizations in Bangladesh at extremely low interest rates. The NGOs then lend money to groups of poor Bangladeshi woman at proposed interest rates of 16 percent.
However, due to hidden fees and obligations, the interest rates climb to about 50 percent, a practice Karim called loansharking.
These women organize themselves into groups and are then expected to lend the money to their established network of relations and kin. When a single woman is unable to pay her loan back on time, the NGO withholds new loans from all the women.
Karim said that while in Bangladesh, she witnessed women selling the pot of rice they needed to feed their children so that they could pay back the NGOs the following morning.
"Everyone from the fieldworker to the management director of the NGO knows what is going on," Karim said. "There is no desire to raise the issue because they have a very good [economic] system in place."
Further complicating matters is the system of social violence and public shaming that punish women who default on their loans. If a woman is unable to pay back her loan, the matter is turned over to the woman's husband and her kin, who often break apart the family's house simply to take and sell the building materials so that the NGO can recover its money. Pubic shame, verbal abuse, forced selling, and repossession are all common tactics that these NGOs capitalize on.
"What is particularly interesting is that we have kin members doing it [tearing apart the family home]. The NGOs have inserted themselves to make the community internalize these codes of violence," Karim said.
The NGOs have also recently launched police cases against defaulting members — these women, branded as criminals, dishonor both themselves and their husband and his lineage, and it is often very difficult for a woman to come back to her husband's home after such public shaming, Karim said.
"Women embody men's honor and reassure the NGOs of securing their investments," she said.
Karim proposed a dual-fold system to improve the situation of poor Bangladeshi women. She said that the NGOs should make contracts with individual women as opposed to enforcing group contracts and should also find and train women to provide them with skills so that they could do something with they money they have been lent.
"[We have a] total brutalization of human beings — using shame as a means of social control. Poor women have become pawns of the political agendas of NGOs," Karim said.
Karim, who earned a doctorate in Anthropology from Rice University, was the winner of the John W. Gardner Award in Humanities and Social Sciences for the most outstanding doctoral dissertation while at Rice. She is also the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship and a Guggenheim Fellowship.
The Program on Religion, Conflict, and Peacebuilding will continue Oct. 17 as visiting fellow Patricia Lawrence gives a lecture on violence, suffering, and healing in Sri Lanka's war zone.
All News Stories for Friday, October 4, 2002
